


Give me time and I'll give you a revolution

by OfPillar



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fashion & Models, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Canon compliant harassment of Dopheld Mitaka, F/M, Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-18
Updated: 2018-11-22
Packaged: 2019-08-25 12:18:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16661039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OfPillar/pseuds/OfPillar
Summary: It’s kind of cliche, but Rey gets discovered while waiting tables at the Castle.





	1. Chapter 1

It’s kind of cliche, but Rey gets discovered while waiting tables at the Castle. Despite maxing out her work-study hours and doing private tutoring under the table, all it takes is one shitty ex-landlord and suddenly she’s short the $1000 security deposit that’s supposed to go towards the student contribution portion of her financial aid package.

 

She could take a semester off, but that means deferring her full-time offer and there’s no guarantee it’ll still be waiting when she graduates with the 8 remaining credits left on her degree in civil engineering. So Rey asks Rose and Rose asks a bunch of people, and that’s how she ends up accidentally meeting disgraced fashion designer Luke Skywalker when she’s waitressing over winter break at the Castle, a greasy spoon tucked up high in the quiet woods a half-hour’s drive from campus.

 

“Ever do any modeling?” he asks as she’s arranging his breakfast, a large and irritatingly complicated order of french toast topped with crispy bacon and poached eggs, maple syrup in a tiny ceramic pot, artery-clogging turkey sausage cozied up next to the buttery drop biscuits, crispy waffle fries, and colorful fruit salad.

 

Rey pastes on a big smile. “A little bit,” she lies. “Nothing professional, though.”

 

It’s a popular pick-up line among the truckers who drift through this small diner in this remote New England college town. Rey’s quickly become immune to the gamut of comments that inevitably follow about her face and body; it’s kind of hard to feel like a goddess when the guys saying that you look like one are also copping a feel of your ass while wearing T-shirts stained with peanut sauce. But the unimpressed look Skywalker gives her makes Rey think he’s not going to be so easy to snow; she reddens, feeling kind of like a teenager caught out wearing a low-cut shirt by her disapproving dad. Not that Unkar Plutt would have minded if she’d traded in her mathlete hoodies for something more form-fitting. Skywalker just takes a deep swig of his blueberry oat milk and hands her a business card with a payment quote scrawled on the back.

 

By the time Rey rocks up to his stone hut - there’s really no other way to describe the residence Google Maps directs her to - she knows a couple more things about the man. Luke Skywalker blazed through the Central St. Martins College of Art and Design as well as several prestigious apprenticeships at major fashion houses across London, Paris, and Milan, before launching his own wildly successful label that went up in flames six years ago. There were rumors on the internet about a mass defection of the designers underneath him, coordinated by none other than his own nephew, which more than anything else is what makes Rey agree to a modeling session with the man. Abandonment is a bitch.

 

Skywalker doesn’t exactly ooze sleaziness so much as a depressing, midlife-male-crisis sort of vibe, but just to be safe Rey brings along Rose and a pocket can of mace. It turns out to be a laughable precaution, because Skywalker’s workshop is aggressively monastic. Rey stands in an opaque slip for four hours as several dour, pinched-looking female assistants in white work gowns circle around her, taking measurements and and chittering to one other in a language Rey doesn’t understand. She still gets the impression that they’re judging her. Skywalker sits in one corner, studying the whole affair with an inscrutable gaze as his pen occasionally dances across the sketchpad in his lap.

 

“Thanks for that. Can you come back again?” he asks as he hands her five crisp $20 bills.

 

Rey blinks. “I guess? How many times?”

 

She ends up making three more trips to his workshop over the next couple weeks. He never asks her to pose, so she mostly just stands around while the assistants prod and cluck over her. Occasionally Skywalker will pepper Rey with random questions about her life: the one-traffic-stop town in Arizona where she grew up, the carefully tended nursery of plants in her dorm room, her inability to swim. He keeps it all fairly sarcastic and impersonal, which suits her just fine. In return, she asks about the technical side of what he does: pattern-making, fabric selection, sewing. She’s surprised to learn that couture - the level of skill and planning that goes into conceptualizing it, constructing it - rivals the engineering projects she’s worked on for co-ops and internships. Though it’s tempting, Rey doesn’t try to peek inside the volumes of notebooks Skywalker fills during their conversations, not even at their last session. He never offers to let her look, either.

 

All in all, it’s the easiest $400 Rey’s ever made. She ends up getting to leave work at the Castle a week earlier than expected and spends it on a trip to Acadia with some other people from her engineering program. Spring semester passes by in a whirl of classes, commencement week celebrations, and moving to NYC with Rose for work. By the time Luke Skywalker’s comeback collection explodes across the fashion world that fall, Rey’s almost entirely forgotten that she ever took part in the whole thing.

 

*

A few blocks over from her cubicle in the State Department of Environmental Conservation, Kylo Ren stalks out of a conference room at First Order operational headquarters and smashes an entire hall of mirrors.

 

*

The collection is called _Ray of Light._

 

The press has a field day with it. Kylo is forced to endure not only the usual circus of bullshit and ego that Snoke siccs upon him every Fashion Week, but also the endless sly queries asking him how he feels about Luke Skywalker’s glorious return this season after six years of conspicuous absence.

 

The red haze of rage descends quickly, and sticks around. When Kylo finally comes out of it, NYFW is over, Snoke has reamed him out in front of a smirking Hux for getting overshadowed by his fucking recluse of an uncle yet again, and an intern shaking like a leaf is leaving Skywalker’s exclusive print interview with _Vogue_ on Kylo’s half-destroyed desk.

 

“ _Anything else_?” he breathes after he’s finished systematically reducing his CFDA Best Newcomer award to rubble. As usual, Luke has given away nothing to the press, which only whets their appetite more, spouting some vague philosophical bullshit about his time in the mountains of New Hampshire providing new inspiration on what fashion should illuminate about the human condition.

 

The intern - Dopheld Mitaka, fresh out of Parsons, speciality in woven embroidery - holds out a thin manila folder.

 

“After some research, I believe I’ve located the muse that Luke Skywalker referred briefly to in his interview,” Mitaka says, tremulous. He flinches when Kylo rips the folder out of his hands and starts flipping through it, but soldiers on. “I just thought you might be interested, especially since she currently works in this city-”

 

Mitaka’s actually done an impressive job for once in his lackluster internship, but Kylo doesn’t register much of what the guy says beyond that because his entire awareness takes a hairpin turn to lock onto the girl in the photographs.

 

They’re grainy from being blown up in size, obviously taken by a variety of smartphones and downloaded from Facebook and Instagram. Kylo holds the first photo up by the edges and stares at it for a long, long time: at the pale pink whorl of her ear, the elegant slope of her forehead and shoulders, the sweet bow of her mouth and those glasscutter eyes. Objectively, he registers symmetrical, pleasing ratios in the arrangement of her facial features, but Kylo’s response isn’t one he entirely controls - a physical _pull_ that has nothing to do with lust and everything to do with the bolt of recognition that sings down his spine.  

 

Unfortunately, when he tries to approach her outside the work address Mitaka forwards, she does not seem to share the sentiment.

 

“Thanks, but I'm not interested,” she says, shouldering a bag and trying to edge away towards the subway stop.

 

He takes a step to the right, easily blocking her. “I can show you how to unlock your potential,” Kylo insists. “More than Luke Skywalker ever did. You’re not just beautiful you have an eye for beauty _I know it,_ but you need a teacher.”

 

In the flesh, wearing a lumpy green overcoat and staring up at him with blown-open pupils, the girl's pull turns nearly magnetic. Kylo is seized by the bizarre need to touch the vulnerable divot of skin between her nose and upper lip, to know every piece of her intimately, to carry her away from this grating, shitty corner of the city and give her everything she wants: care, sex, food, laughter, sun, sleep.

 

“Please,” he whispers, holding out a hand.

 

That's when she maces him.


	2. Chapter 2

“I want a do-over,” Kylo Ren demands.

 

Rey definitely does not put her hands on her hips, just as she definitely did not almost shriek like a little girl yesterday when a tall, dark-haired man raving about Luke Skywalker and eyes cornered her on her way home after a long day of meetings. “Really selling your case here.”

 

The scowl Ren directs at her gets exponentially more murderous, which is kind of impressive considering how he already seems about 500% angrier than the average human being. “I didn’t think you were going to fucking _pepper spray_ me _._ ” He’d gone down with a roar of pain; before she sprinted away into the subway station, she saw him scrubbing at bloodshot eyes with an honest-to-god pocket square.

 

“That tends to happen when you’re being stalked by a creep,” Rey retorts.

 

Ren gives her a look that manages to convey both staggering disbelief and profound annoyance at once. Which is fair - despite her lackluster dating resume, Rey’s red-blooded enough to recognize that the interesting, angular, irrepressible bad boy thing he’s got going on probably makes his persistence come off a lot more charismatic than unsettling most of the time. It’s too bad he’s clearly unhinged like a door in a hurricane.

 

“Can we move this somewhere else?” Ren asks after a sullen pause. “I’d rather not do this here.”

 

Rey looks around. The only people on this street paying them any attention are the 2 homeless guys who sometimes rifle through the dumpsters behind her office block. Everyone else barely spares them a glance - _trouble in paradise?_ \- before rushing on. God bless New York City. “And turn into another crime statistic? Sounds like a bad trade.”

 

Kylo Ren rolls his very dark, very intense, very exasperated eyes. “I’ll throw in dinner.”

 

“Yeah, sure, let’s go to Lilia before you dump the body.”

 

It’s the trendiest restaurant she can name, four dollar signs on Yelp and the place where her boss’s boss just proposed to his fiance. She’s not even sure what they serve beyond Italian food, but Ren shrugs like she’s just suggested Olive Garden and pulls out his phone. “That new place in Brooklyn? All right.”

 

It’s not until he moves to raise the phone to his ear that she realizes he’s actually being serious. Without thinking, she grabs his arm. “Wait! Kidding, I was kidding.”

 

When Rey was seven, she touched a live wire in her foster father’s car workshop. 240 volts surging through her while she stood rooted to the ground in frozen agony, vividly aware but unable to let go. It probably lasted seconds but felt like a lot longer - not the pain so much as the sensation of being simultaneously whacked by a baseball bat and poured full of of sparking electricity that had vibrated in her for days afterwards: searing heat, the punch of adrenaline. That is what happens when she touches Ren for the first time.

 

He takes a sharp breath and lurches forward for one long moment - Rey’s body mirroring his own unconsciously, instant language - before they both jerk back, spots of color blooming in Rey’s vision from the whiplash.

 

“They don’t take reservations anyway,” she blurts out in apology after a tense second, trying haphazardly to bridge the two different conversations they seem to be having. “And I’m sorry, but Skywalker was a one-time thing when I needed some quick cash. I don’t do…that. Anymore. I’m just an engineer for the city.”

 

This close, she can see the disappointed details when Ren's face falls: how his jaw works in frustration, the slashes of his eyebrows crunching up. “Not to me,” he insists in a raked-over voice. “Not for me, it wouldn't be a one time thing.”

 

The air turns thick enough to coat the back of a spoon, and Rey is suddenly very glad that eighteen years of lurching from foster home to foster home instilled a powerful aversion to emotional vulnerability or accepting kindness. The certainty in his words stokes an echoing flame low down in her belly, promising, _dangerous_. More pleading than she'd like, Rey says, “Please don't make me pepper spray you again.”

 

Ren is either crazy levels of desperate or masochistic, because he just smiles and steps forward. “It's dinner, Rey, not a crucifixion.” And also some kind of mind reader, because the next thing he says is, “It'd be way more for me than you anyway. You'd be doing me a favor.”

 

Bargaining. Safer ground. Rey swallows and takes a defensive step back. “You’re very sure about stuff, huh?”

 

And Kylo Ren doesn't do anything so disturbingly out of character as _wink_ at her, but he does seem to bite back a smile. “Let's just say I have a feeling it'll be worth my while.”

 

*

When Kylo stops by Hux's office on Thursday, the first thing the guy says is, “What the fuck happened to _you_?”

 

Kylo could fill twelve encyclopedias with everything he hates about the fashion industry - the constant self-aggrandizement, the parties that all blur together into drugged-out sameness, the longstanding insinuations by _Rebel_ magazine that he must be secretly gay or more attracted to his own reflection than other human beings, which, _fuck_ Poe Dameron - but Armitage Hux has a whole book reserved exclusively for him. They're more similar than Kylo’s entirely comfortable with: both third-generation fashion brats, raised at the hip of various nannies while their parents fucked off to whatever city they were doing a show in or flying through next, returning just long enough for a breathless interview on _work-life balance_ and to make sure the top-shelf liquor wasn't entirely drunk through. But since Kylo left Skywalker’s fashion house  to become Artistic Director at Empire in New York, his relationship with Hux has evolved from sarcastic camaraderie and one mutually regrettable drunk hookup in college to a full blown, knock-down, drag-out rivalry. Which Kylo is currently winning.

 

“Do you have the access card to the paper archives?” he asks, impatient.

 

Hux just continues to wig out, lips curling back and nose wrinkling in disgust. “Did you take a curling iron to your hair or something? Did you hire a personal stylist?”

 

“The access card,” Kylo repeats, thinking back to that museum in Iceland he once visited where they explained the process for making pants from human skin. He kind of gets the appeal now. “Unless you've lost it somehow.”

 

With an aggrieved sigh, Hux goes and starts pulling open various drawers around his pin-neat workshop. “I'm just saying, you look surprisingly shiny for someone who's been holed up in his office all week without letting anyone inside. What the hell have you been working on? The interns were taking bets on who would have to excavate your dead body from the fabric swatches.”

 

As if Hux wouldn't gleefully push his way to the front of the line. “I have been doing my job. Like I'm trying to do now,” Kylo says.

 

“Apparently.” At long last, Hux locates and hands over the access card, eyes glittering with malice. “Well, let me know if there’s anything I can relay to Snoke while you're...occupied. He's been asking after the Knights line.”

 

For once, Kylo does not give a single solitary fuck what Snoke thinks of him, alone or in comparison to Armitage goddamn Hux. “I'll send Mitaka if I think of something,” he says, and sweeps out of Hux's office before the oil slick can get a last word in.

 

*

 

The paper archives are a hermetically sealed labyrinth under Empire HQ, reams of proprietary sketchbooks, notebooks, and loose leaf sheets from designers past unmarred by the acid touch of sun or smartphone flashes. Some of the materials are almost a century old. Kylo makes a beeline for the very furthest stacks. Kept in a separate bulletproof, fire-retardant safe that only he and Snoke have the password for, sits Anakin Skywalker's legacy.

 

Kylo's grandfather.

 

He's parsed these pages a hundred thousand times, a hundred thousand times spent memorizing the work that took haute couture lightyears beyond what anyone had done before. Anakin Skywalker, who burned like a comet for the actress Padme Amidala and designed so many wildly, impossibly beautiful things in her image that those peerless collections are still the bedrock upon which Empire trades its reputation a century later, the echo that Kylo has been striving to answer his whole life.

 

When he compares them to the designs he created after his dinner with Rey, he feels not wholly inadequate for the first time in his life.

 

She's out there right now. Walking, talking, buying groceries and drifting among the faceless mash of people who stream in and out of midtown Manhattan every day. The knowledge both excites and terrifies Kylo. To him, Rey is remarkable and painfully self-sufficient, so luminous that he can’t believe no one around them in the streets or in that restaurant was as distressed as he was over the enthusiastic scrape of her fork tines through the sauce on her plate, how no one felt something in their chest turn over at her small sighs when he passed her his half of dessert, why everyone else wasn't losing snatches of time during awkward moments pondering the coil of her hair in a bun, the guardedness of her eyes, her rare but artless smiles. Kylo had greedily collected all the flashes of character Rey let slip during their conversation too, from the hurt, stubborn fire in her expression when she dismissed her lonely childhood in Arizona to the clean way she cut him down when he insisted that leaving from under his uncle's suffocating wing had only made him a stronger designer: “I think you're only pretending to be strong.”

 

That judgement tempered by infuriating understanding - it was better and worse than any of the vices Kylo has tried to stimulate himself with these last six years. Normally, positive mentions of Luke Skywalker set him off into fits of silence or explosive anger, the latter of which Snoke is all too happy to encourage since it's usually when Kylo becomes most productive. Faced with Rey, who can't stand to see food wasted and has somehow constructed a neat little life for herself out of the worn-thin scraps of Arizona, New Hampshire, and New York, he can only cough and change the subject. (“What do you like to do on weekends?” “Hike. Watch those YouTube videos where they restore old stuff like knives and toasters.”)

 

At least he hasn't jerked off to her yet.

 

It's been a close thing at some points, this past week, and Kylo has taken a lot of very cold showers. There is a fine line between imagining Rey's strong, slight body in the clothes he will make, and then what that body might look like _out_ of said clothes, warm to the touch and humming with laughter.

 

Kylo wants to make her laugh more. _That_ new fantasy is somehow even more humiliating than all the ones in which he peels her out of a diaphanous dress of tulle and organza and fingerfucks her until she sobs his name.

 

Abruptly, his eye travels to a familiar sketch of Padme Amidala, resplendent in the experimental, longing outlines of an iconic high-throated crimson silk gown that she would ultimately wear to her second Oscars nomination. This was designed before she and Anakin reunited at that now-famous party in Paris hosted by Obi-Wan Kenobi, back when Anakin had to clip photographs out of print magazines and buy tickets to _Queen of Naboo_ over and over just to catch a glimpse of her. Kylo’s grandmother - though he rarely thinks of her that way, immortalized on the silver screen as a dewy-eyed ingenue - seems to stare back at him disapprovingly. _So this is how chivalry dies, with your stupid, uncontrollable need to immediately bang a nice girl with pretty eyes._

 

Kylo closes the safe. He'll figure out a way to see Rey again - in person. Better. _Real_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So it turns out this universe is a little too much fun to write and I am incapable of developing a ficlet without it growing arms and legs and a long and overly involved plot. Blagh.
> 
> Also, in my head, the founder of Empire before Snoke became CEO is Palpatino. Get it? Because Palpatino = Valentino.
> 
> ...
> 
> I'll show myself out.

**Author's Note:**

> Alternate titles for this drabble included “STAR WARS: THE THREAD AWAKENS”, “Phantom (Menace) Thread”, and "I wear your granddad's clothes (I look in incredible)". I know. No one is more embarrassed by this than me.


End file.
